Over the years, a number of different types of fertilizer compositions have been developed and employed in agriculture. In the recent past, synthetic chemical fertilizer compositions dominated the fertilizer marketplace. However, more recently, there has been increasing public awareness of, and concern regarding, the potential link between synthetic chemical fertilizer use and human disease and/or poisoning. Consequently, there has been a significant movement toward “organic” fertilizer compositions which do not rely on synthetic chemicals and which are typically derived from natural sources.
As a result of the increased demand for organic fertilizer compositions, there is significant interest in the development of new and/or better organic fertilizer compositions that provide the desirable and/or necessary nutrients, and that reduce the risk of introducing pathogens into the food supply.
The desirable nutrients include, but are not limited to, bioavailable phosphorous, potassium and nitrogen. These nutrients must not only be present, but they must be present in sufficient concentrations to be beneficial to agricultural vegetation. In addition, the organic fertilizer compositions must be in a form that is readily applied to the agricultural vegetation and/or has minimum impact on the surrounding community. To this end, the desirable characteristics of organic fertilizer compositions include, but are not limited to: the ability to directly apply the organic fertilizer compositions in a low viscosity liquid form; the ability to inject and/or add the organic fertilizer compositions into irrigation streams; time-released nitrogen components which become bioavailable to agricultural vegetation by beneficial microbial digestion in soil; the elimination of chemical crop burning; minimal odor associated with the organic fertilizer composition during and/or after application; and the minimization of undesirable runoff situations.
In an effort to find a cost-efficient organic fertilizer composition, numerous attempts have been made to utilize waste products generated by fermentation and/or refined sugar processing as an organic fertilizer composition. These attempts have included deriving organic fertilizer compositions from malt extracts and/or spent grain liquor; treating molasses to recover potash and nitrogen in solid form for use as an organic fertilizer composition; deriving organic fertilizer compositions from commercially available molasses; deriving thixotrophic fertilizer compositions from organic materials including molasses; and deriving organic fertilizer compositions from yeast/black strap molasses. However, these organic fertilizer compositions typically lack the requisite concentrations of nutrients to be beneficial to agricultural vegetation.
Some efforts to “boost” the concentrations of nutrients in these waste by-product based organic fertilizer compositions require significant chemical processing and/or the addition of synthetically derived chemicals. However, this approach often defeated the original goal of developing an “organic” fertilizer composition, and in many cases proved too costly to be economically feasible. In other cases, attempts have been made to add relatively organic materials to other organic fertilizers, such as fertilizer products derived from fish. For example, in some cases, attempts were made to add relatively organic materials to the waste product based organic fertilizer compositions such as enzyme digested fish or “liquid fish.” However, enzyme digested fish is created by adding an enzyme that virtually “dissolves” the fish into an enzyme digested fish solution. Since the fish is composed of mostly water to start with, the resultant enzyme digested fish solution is also mostly water, typically 80% or more water. As a result, the concentrations of desirable nutrients, particularly nitrogen, are still low. In addition, the enzyme digested fish solution, and virtually any fertilizer utilizing the enzyme digested fish solution, has an extremely strong, and unpleasant, odor. Consequently, the use of any fertilizer utilizing the enzyme digested fish solution is often restricted to areas far removed from human communities. However, with the encroachment of human communities on virtually all farm lands throughout the world, farming locations sufficiently removed from human communities to allow non-problematic use of the enzyme digested fish solution are becoming rarer and rarer.
As noted, some sources of fertilizer nutrients were traditionally taught to be too expensive and/or non-organic. An N-trimethylated amino acid historically used as a feed additive for many animal species, betaine is a source of fertilizer nutrients traditionally taught to be both non-organic and too expensive for organic fertilizer use. Given the cost of betaine, and the fact that betaine was considered non-organic, traditional teaching was that it was more cost effective for a user seeking fertilizer to purchase urea, which contains a higher percentage of nitrogen than betaine. Thus, given the initial expense of betaine, and its relatively small percentage of nitrogen, traditional agriculture largely ignored betaine as a viable fertilizer.
As a result, there is a current need for an environmentally benign fertilizer derived from a natural organic source that provides sufficient levels of usable nutrients but does not require significant processing and does not raise environmental concerns.